That all those parts in her do altogether dwell,

For which the others do so severally excel.

My Charnwood, like the last, hath in herself alone

What excellence can be in any Forest shown."-Drayton's Polyolbion.

Crow Hill, near Woodhouse Eaves, probably took its name from a rookery. The old trees, many of them twenty feet in circumference, were sold by an Earl of Stamford to the charcoal burners at Melbourne, and after being charred on the Forest, the charcoal was removed thither in bags, laid on horses.-(Nichols.)

Bens Cliff, near Maplewell, was known to have been covered with oaks about 1745.* From this period the Copt Oak, the Outwoods, White Horse Wood, the oaks growing in Bradgate Park, and about Charley Hall, are nearly the only vestiges of the ANCIENT FOREST.

It is not, however, improbable, that there are still some oaks, among the few remaining on Charnwood, that were growing at a period little less remote than the Norman Conquest. The trees to which I should be inclined to assign such a longevity are the COPT OAK, one or two on the skirts of the OUTWOODS, and some in BRADGATE PARK.

Several oaks lately felled in Sherwood Forest, exposed, on being sawn up, the date 1212, and the mark or cipher of King John; and it has been calculated that these trees must have been several centuries old at the time the mark was made.

It is well known that the oak that proved fatal

"To that Red-King, who, while of yore
Thro' Boldre-wood the chase he led,
By his loved Huntsman's arrow bled,"

was standing a few years ago in the New Forest. They who think a tree insufficient to record a fact of so ancient a date, "should be reminded," says Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, "that seven hundred years make no extraordinary period in the existence of an oak.” Indeed, some authors have calculated with great ingenuity, and with considerable show of truth, that some old oaks now, or lately existing, may have been growing for centuries before the Christian era. Some noble oaks, a few years ago blown down in Donington Park, were supposed, by their internal rings, to have been nearly eight hundred years old.

Nichols' East Goscote, page 135.